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Who says an icon can’t evolve? The Original 501, Levi’s riveted-for-strength jean style, patented 141 years ago in May, has been an American classic ever since.

A new 501 will debut in the financial markets on April 3, when the S&P 500 allows a new class of C shares to begin trading in addition to the current A shares, thus unofficially creating an S&P 501 with 500 companies but 501 different shares. (B shares, held by the company founders, do not trade and grant 10 votes/share.)

Whatever else it is--and I’ve heard a lot along the lines of “unprecedented financial maneuvering designed to reduce the voice of Google common shareholders” as C share grant no voting rights--what’s significant is not what Google is doing so much as what the S&P is doing in re-imagining its popular S&P index.

The question is, why?

Here it helps to consider what is, and is not, relevant. For instance, whether or not multiple-class stocks make for second hand stockholders is not the issue. There are already dozens of companies in the S&P 500 that have multiple classes of stock and many more outside it.

At , Sumner Redstone owns only about 10% of the company, yet oversees almost 80% of its votes. A shares account for roughly 70% of market cap, yet fail to provide a single vote. It's only the minority Bs, heavily controlled by Murdoch, that grant this power. News Corp. changed its name to 21st Century Fox (FOX) and joined the S&P 500 last year.

It’s also not an issue of Google bamboozling shareholders. The Internet search giant went public with a format that allowed co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to oversee two-thirds of total voting authority.

Indeed the C class stock (officially announced April 2012) was foreshadowed in Google’s IPO filing: "New investors will fully share in [our] economic future but will have little ability to influence . . . strategic decisions through their voting rights." Google has not misled anyone.

What is relevant is that the S&P index’s rules were already in the process of being changed to recognizing the trend, particularly among tech companies like Google, of offering multiple share classes. Ignoring this trend would lead to “difficultly properly representing major market segments while providing sufficient liquidity to accommodate trading and necessary index adjustments,” according to a press release.

A date for the change had not previously been set for the adjustment; it now will occur after the quarterly rebalance in September 2015.

Another relevant point: After initially saying they would handle Google according to the old rules and putting it out for comment on February 3, the index received pushback from index-fund managers and exchange-traded funds that track the indexes asking that they reconsider the decision. This would have created a situation where they may have been forced to sell the excluded class and then add it back 18 months later. Fund managers cited the size of the trades necessary to replace class A with class C, the tax impact on index fund investors, and the loss of voting rights associated with the sale of class A shares.

And so, the S&P 1) reversed course on the way it normally replaces one share class with another after a brief transition [incidentally, the index has held 501 stocks during such switchovers] and 2) set a date for a formal recalibration (September 2015).

Nor are such changes really unprecedented.

No less than the NYSE has flip flopped on the whole dual class stock issue: It allowed non-voting dual class shares starting in 1896 with The International Silver Company; banned them after the market crash of 1929; officially did away with the “one share, one vote” rule in 1986 (when dual class structures proved a useful tool to rebuff the corporate raiders of that era); again tightened rules but--crucially--agreed to allow a company to go public if its dual class structure was already in effect at the time of the IPO.

NASDAQ OMX famously altered its rules specifically to land Facebook’s listing when it abandoned the long-held stipulation that shares be “seasoned” (aka publicly traded) for two years before being added to its 100 Index. The regulation was suddenly shortened to three months.